"By the way, the Iron Curtain fell because the communists had lots of tanks and jets and even spaceships, but no dishwashers, or color televisions, or personal cars, and in the capitalist west they did, along with better food and freedom."

I've often wondered what makes people believe this. Do you think the Russians saw Western colour TVs on their own B&W TVs and said, "I want one of those, let's collapse our empire"? Do you think they saw that the amount of domestic work done by housewives actually increased when they got washing machines and wanted in, all the while being cut off from all other news from the West? Do you think that East Germans looked at their higher meat consumption vis a vis West Germans and worried about their arteries, thus toppling the Berlin Wall in a fit of veganism?

I've known a lot of Germans that grew up in the DDR, and they all say that all they wanted was the freedom to travel. They didn't want the entire rest of their social system demolished. Germany has spent a fortune on bringing the ex-DDR up to Western standards of living, yet this still produces a lot of resentment even now. The further East you go, the less levelling-up has achieved. Poland and Ukraine are now producing software engineers that work with Western teams and even contracts for Western engineers to come to them, yet by-and-large it is taking decades to reach Western levels of consumption.

Nor were Western consumer habits ever much of a motivation. People wanted to be out from under the Russian boot, and to be able to move jobs and homes, and because Gorbachev gave them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by signalling that Russia would for once not prevent them.